How to Shoot Somebody Who Outdrew You
by Sandrine Shaw
Summary: All's fair in love and war.  Yuri Orlov/Jack Valentine


**How to Shoot Somebody Who Outdrew You **

by Sandrine Shaw

Reaching the state where you'd lost everything in your life that you ever held dear had its advantages, the biggest of them being that you did not care anymore. You could focus on the important things, because it didn't make a difference to you what people thought of you, or whether you were gonna live or die. Of course, there weren't all that many important things left to focus on either. But the point was, it didn't matter whether someone held a gun to your head, because you didn't give a shit.

The steel was cold and hard and almost comfortable. It wasn't one of my own. A standard M9. Sleek, black, powerful. A good weapon for an execution.

I tilted my head slightly to ease the pressure of the muzzle on my temple and looked up to meet the hard gray eyes of Jack Valentine. He had changed since our last encounter. He was hardly the same guy who sat across from me in the interrogation room five months ago. The single-minded desire to bring me down was still there, burning perhaps stronger than ever now, but there was also a disgust at the world at large. He'd been robbed of the belief that deep down, everything was how it should be, that there was justice, and good always triumphed against evil. I had done this, I realized; it was me who had changed him – and for a moment, I felt a stab of regret.

"What are you going to do now, huh? You gonna kill me?" My tone implied that I was sure this wasn't going to happen.

But I didn't know that. The Jack who pushed a gun into my face in the Ukraine, back in 1992, wouldn't have pulled the trigger. The Jack who found me with an empty plane in Sierra Leone in 2000 stopped one of his men from taking my head off with a machete, even though no one would ever have known. The Jack who arrested me earlier this year wouldn't have overstepped his moral boundaries either. But this was not the same man; and who knew if his moral boundaries hadn't shifted the same way his view of justice had.

I had no way of knowing whether he'd pull the trigger or not. I thought that perhaps this should worry me, but it didn't. Everyone had to die some time, and today was as good as any other day. And, while I didn't really have any preferences regarding the identity of the man who was going to put a bullet through my brain, it seemed oddly fitting that it should be Jack Valentine. There was a kind of poetic justice to it: that through my death, I'd have corrupted the incorruptible.

I held his gaze, unblinking, and waited for him to make up his mind. His hand was trembling. He pushed the gun harder against my face. I winced, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of craning my neck any further to get away from it.

"Do you know how many people have been killed with your weapons? Do you even _care_?" He sounded frustrated and angry. He was stalling for time, and I knew it, but I indulged him. I wasn't in a particular hurry to die. I wasn't in a hurry to resume my life either. I had all the time in the world.

"You think you're innocent because after all it's not you who kills those people. It's always the bullet, or the missile, or the tank, but never you. Well, newsflash, Orlov – _you_ are the bullet. You are the fucking weapon."

I concentrated on the extra pressure he put on the gun at those last few words, focusing my attention on the pain instead of on what he said. It was all I could do not to roll my eyes at his little speech. He had always been too fucking dramatic.

I'd never been under the illusion that I was _innocent_. I was tempted to tell him that, but in the end, I couldn't be bothered.

After a while, the gun eased off, and I was almost disappointed. But then Jack trailed it down my cheek, and I felt the muzzle nudging against my lips. I wondered if I was supposed to open them, if Jack wanted me to eat the gun and shoot me into my mouth, making it look like suicide. If he did, he'd better tell me.

But the gun didn't push inside, just trailed my lips in an almost lazy, dreamy manner that lacked the aggressiveness of Jack's previous conduct.

The frown on his face didn't ease, and neither did the open repulsion reflecting in his eyes, but when he spoke again, his tone was almost conversational. "Are you turned on by weapons, Orlov?"

"No," I said against the steel, without contemplating the question. Then, with a smirk: "Are you, Jack? Do you get off on this?"

He looked straight at me for a long moment, and I silently counted to eight until he lost it.

Instead of the shot I expected, I felt the impact of the gun handle crashing against my right temple. It was white-hot pain – the kind that made your vision go black and your body curl itself together like a fetus in your mother's stomach. I thought I heard him curse at me, a litany of 'fuck you's I barely understood because the pain was all-consuming and numbed my senses until there was nothing but it and me.

When I woke up, I was lying on the floor, dried blood coating the right half of my face. A quick glance at the clock told me that nearly fourteen hours had passed. It was afternoon, and it was raining. Other than my battered face, there was no indication that Jack had ever been there to begin with. My head ached worse than the hangover I had after the party for Vitaly's eighteenth birthday. The rest of my body didn't feel much better.

I thought Jack was a fucking sadist for letting me live.

But it hadn't been the end, just a fucking interlude; and after that, life went on. Nothing changed – or if it did, it didn't affect me. I was still the best private weapon dealer, and Agent Valentine was still my shadow – ever-present, always one step behind, and always waiting for a chance to bring me down. If that failed (and it always did), he settled for delaying me.

It got tiresome – not to mention dangerous, because who wanted to make business with a man who was hardly ever on time because some hotshot agent was exercising his right to hold him for 24 hours without charging every other fucking week?

I mentioned this to my friend Colonel Southern, and – in the mysterious ways the chain of command works – Jack got a reprimand and the order to stop bothering the innocent citizen Yuri Orlov unless he had definite proof of criminal activity. Which, of course, he hadn't. I wished I'd seen his face when they gave him that particular order.

But Jack was nothing if not persistent.

It was late 2001, and the world was in turmoil. I was busier than ever, commuting between the war zones in Congo and Afghanistan on a weekly basis. In Congo, Léon Braco, the right-hand man of the right-hand man of the second-in-command of a rebel leader who preferred to remain anonymous, had a room in a small hotel in Kisangani reserved for me on stand-by. It wasn't exactly the Hilton, but at least the danger of getting your throat slit in the middle of the night, while sleeping the sleep of the not-quite-righteous, was only half as likely as in most other establishments in the area.

One afternoon – I had just arrived from the airport in a shiny black limousine that looked great from a thirty foot distance and proved to be close to falling apart at closer inspection – I walked in to find a woman sitting on the bed. There was no mistaking her for a chamber maid, with her endless legs and satin skin and dark, promising eyes. Of course, the fact that there wasn't a fiber of cloth covering her perfect body was a bit of a give-away, too.

I'd been in business with Braco and his sponsors for seven months now, and their generosity had long since stopped astonishing me. Their surprisingly good taste with their pick, however, did. - Not that I was going to question it.

My own personal Miss Latin Beauty introduced herself in bad English as Roselyn. That was pretty much all she said. She was a devoted advocate of the Elvis philosophy: a little less conversation, a little more action. It wasn't like I had any objections to that.

Her hands were soft and warm, with a hint of danger as long fingernails danced over my skin, and they definitely knew what they were doing. She tasted of heat and spices; and if the alarm in my cell phone hadn't set off, it might have been enough to take away my senses and lure me into her web of seduction.

As it was, though, I untangled myself from her with great difficulty, collecting all my willpower to step away when her hands reached for me. Life was terribly unfair sometimes.

While I was busy refastening my pants and resisting the urge to follow her siren's call, I tried to find a compromise. "Look, I need to go and meet someone. The man who arranged this little get-together." I tried my most winsome smile on her. "Maybe when I come back, we could finish what we started?"

I had expected feeble protests, some sexy pouting, bedroom eyes that said, "Are you sure you want to leave me like this?" and "I really don't want you to go." The naked panic that struck her when she realized that I was serious about leaving took me by surprise. She didn't even try to make her begging sound wanton or sensuous, she went straight to desperate. I generally have no objections to beautiful women throwing themselves at me, but when she tried to hold on to my hand for dear life, crying that I shouldn't, couldn't, _mustn't_ leave, it wasn't as appealing as it should have been.

The more I tried to reason with her, the more upset she became. "You can't leave," she flat-out told me at some point. "You leave, I get no money."

For some reason, that piece of information settled uncomfortably in the pit of my stomach, like Vitaly's Borscht. Something was off, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. If she wasn't paid if I left, and I definitely wasn't paid if I didn't leave and missed the appointment, either Braco was trying to frame me, or whoever paid her didn't have the same interests as the ones who paid me. The latter option seemed the more likable one by far, so I asked her who was paying for her services.

Well, maybe I didn't so much ask as yell. I rarely lose my cool. Hot-headed anger hardly ever gets you anywhere, but I felt out of the loop and my inability to make myself heard over her hysterical wailing didn't do much good for my composure. It was a vicious circle: I shouted, she cried, I got louder, so did she. Maybe the hotel staff would've sent someone eventually to see what was going on. Then again, probably not.

In any case, it wasn't a member of the hotel staff who turned up. I cannot say that I was entirely surprised to see Jack Valentine. Roselyn shut up when she saw him, but only for a moment before she let out a stream of apologies and pleas. She really had been a lot more attractive when she'd shut up. My head started to ache, and only the notion that Jack didn't look too happy either cheered me up, if only to some extent.

Finally, he got rid off her by shoving a bunch of dollars at her and gently, but firmly pushing her well-formed body out of the door.

I was still more than a little pissed, but the urge to yell my anger out had passed. "So, Agent Valentine, does Interpol nowadays consider hiring prostitutes a legitimate means to compromise a suspect?"

Jack shot me a withering look that he apparently deemed answer enough. I didn't really think it was, but it had been a rhetorical question anyway.

"Look, Jack, this isn't going to work. Sure, it's a lot more pleasant than being left in handcuffs in the middle of a field in West Africa, but if I wanted a whore, I'd buy myself one. It's not like I couldn't afford it. If you want to keep me from doing my job, you have to do a lot better. How about you get me something I cannot buy myself? Put Ava in my bed, or Jennifer Lopez, or at least have the decency to offer yourself – some random whore, pretty as she was, will hardly stop me."

Jack's forehead furrowed while he listened to me, but other than that, he didn't react. There was no smart-ass comeback, and none of his usual righteous bullshit. In fact, he didn't say a fucking word, just stared at me.

I didn't have time for this, or him, so I grabbed my jacket and turned to go. But before I could get anywhere near the door, Jack suddenly reached out to block me.

I looked down at the hand that had taken a hold of my upper arm, then back up at Jack's face. "What is it now? I thought we'd established that you can't stop me." My tone was somewhere between amusement and annoyance; I was well past the former and had not quite reached the state of the latter.

"Shut up!" Jack said; then he was pushing me backwards into the room. I let him, bemused by the blank expression on his face and the lack of his usual ranting. Later, I'd wonder if I should have seen it coming, but then, it wasn't exactly a turn of events I could have expected. It was only when the back of my knees hit the bed and another gentle push flung me down in a sitting position that I realized Jack's intent. It took me another moment to process this information and to regain my wits, and by the time I had, Jack had already loosened his tie and thrown it over my shoulder on the bed.

"Whoa, wait. You realize that I was joking, right?"

The protest was half-hearted at best – something that I wasn't quite aware of then, but which evidently wasn't lost on Jack. Still not saying a single word, as if he hadn't heard me at all – which made the whole situation a hell of a lot more surreal than it already was – he sunk to his knees in front of me. There was nothing graceful about the motion, it was awkward and tense; but it gave me a certain kind of satisfaction to see Jack's light grey suit wrinkling against the dirty floor.

Before I could rouse myself to react – other than the involuntary, instinctive physical reaction I had neither expected nor noticed up to this point - Jack's hands were on my belt. When I reached down to stop him, he looked up, gray eyes meeting mine.

"This offer has an expiry date. You know that." A matter-of-fact statement, belied only by the faint tremor of his hands I'd have missed if it weren't for the fact that my fingers were still clamped around them.

I thought of Léon Braco, who was expecting me in fifteen minutes, and the ten-million deal, which was going to go straight to hell if I didn't get my ass out of this room and on the way to the rendezvous within the next two minutes. I thought of Jack Valentine, the most righteous, straight-laced man I'd ever met, on his knees with his lips wrapped around my cock; and I decided that Léon Braco could go to hell.

The moment I released Jack's wrists and let him continue, an expression of triumph crossed his face, his eyes glinting with a gleeful 'See, I won.' I wanted to remind him that he might have won this battle, but he'd lost the war a long time ago, before he'd even started it, and I wanted to tell him that the victory he was obviously rejoicing in was a pyrrhic one; but I didn't say anything. There was a time for words, for all those little battle of wits and insults and the bullshitting, and then there was a time when none of it really mattered.

Jack's mouth was hot and tight and wet, and I was pretty sure that he'd never given anyone a blowjob before. There was too much suction and too little finesse; but it didn't really matter, because it was Jack fucking Valentine, and that alone was almost enough to bring me off. Maybe, with some more experience, Jack could have drawn out this encounter a lot longer. As it was, it was over quickly, leaving me spent and sated and generous enough to consider it a matter of fair play not to hurry off to my appointment, even though I might still have made it with only a minor delay.

I remained where I were, sitting in front of him with my pants pooled around my ankles and his palms heavy and clam on my thighs. It was Jack who moved first (another contest I won, almost without realizing it), pushing himself up and disappearing into the bathroom without a backward look. I wondered if he was going to puke or to jack off. Probably both, I thought when he returned, taking in the haunted, guilty look and the pale face.

It was almost enough to feel sorry for him, but then, it had been his idea in the first place and if he regretted it, he wasn't letting it on.

"So… it seems you missed your appointment," he said.

"Apparently."

We almost smiled at each other.

Like the good bloodhound that he was, once Jack had his teeth in something, he didn't let go. Fortunately for me, this only applied in a metaphorical way. But Jack had finally found a way to get to me, to distract me enough that I was willing to forget about my business – no matter how temporarily – and he wasn't about to let go.

I've never had a more intense orgasm than when I fucked Jack Valentine against a dirty brick wall outside a shady bar in Cuba. It was messy and awkward and bruising, and I loved every second of it. The only thing I loved more was the knowledge that Jack had been too late and I had already completed my deal. I never asked Jack whether he knew, I just assumed that he didn't, because anything else would have complicated things infinitely. As long as he was doing what he was doing with the single-minded fixation to stop me, I didn't need to question his motives.

I never really stopped to question my own motives either.

He messed up some good deals for me, but I justified to myself that it only happened because I let him, and that I was smart enough to sidestep him when missing out the deal would have been potentially dangerous or unwise or just monumentally stupid.

I sometimes wondered if Jack could still face himself in the mirror, but he never gave any indication that he was any more bothered by our arrangement than I was. Nothing really changed, other than that we occasionally made each other come. He still never missed a chance to let me know how much he despised me with every word, every look, every touch. Even the way he shrugged off his jacket and folded his pants spoke of scorn. Or maybe I only thought it did because that's what I expected from him. In my line of work, it paid to be paranoid.

There was no way of misreading the taunts and digs he threw at me, though. The way the corners of his lips curled up when he asked, almost casual, "How's Nicolai?"

I pretended it didn't hurt. "At least I had a family. You've been too busy hunting me down to ever have a life. And look where that got you!"

"I wouldn't want to raise a child in this world." Good old Jack, self-righteous to the core.

"Well, that sucks," I told him, "because there is no other world but this one."

He didn't have an answer for that.

I didn't expect him to. Jack was never good at verbal sparring with me – if the idealist goes to war with the cynic, the cynic will always have the better arguments on his side. And no matter how hardened Jack had become, he was still an idealist at heart.

Of course, it wasn't all fun and games.

Jack followed me to Pakistan in late summer 2003. As I was dealing with a new client, I couldn't afford the distraction and struggled to avoid Jack. I'd sent him off on a wild goose-chase following a trail of false evidence of my whereabouts I'd carefully planted. I believed I'd succeeded in shaking him off.

Then he turned up, just when I was about to follow my driver into the rented limo that was to bring me to my client. I hadn't seen Jack so angry in a while – it was almost like our old confrontations, all finger-pointing and righteous accusations. I told him he acted like a teenager who had been ditched at a first date.

His fist flew at me, and next I knew I was flat on my ass.

The driver was moving in, his fingers edging menacingly towards his gun. I knew it wouldn't have taken more than the wink of an eye from me to make him shoot Jack. In fact, he probably would've shot him even without a sign from me, if I hadn't held him back.

I assured him I had the situation under control (which I didn't) and told him to start the car already. The poor sod reluctantly followed me orders.

About forty seconds later, there was heat and noise and car parts scattered around me like falling snow.

It was the third time I'd seen a car blown in the air right under my nose. I was rooted to the spot, staring at the burning wreck in shocked fascination. My shoulder ached, my ears felt numb, my eyes were stinging. There was a sudden, unrelenting pressure on my arm. When I turned to see what it was, I realized that Jack was trying to pull me up. He had his gun drawn, waving it around in a hazardous manner. His mouth was forming words, but I couldn't hear anything. Deaf and dumbstruck and still frozen in motionlessness, I stared up at him for what seemed like minutes.

When my hearing finally returned, his voice seemed faint and like an echo, telling me to get up. I nodded vaguely and allowed him to pull me to my feet.

I knew it should have been me in the car. As much as I wanted to push that thought away, to bury it somewhere in the depths of my mind and ignore it as I had ignored any other danger and threat in the past, I couldn't.

Jack's hands moved over my body, briskly and almost businesslike, as he was padding me for injuries. – Jack Valentine, my personal bodyguard and Nurse Nightingale all in one. In any other situation, I might have appreciated the irony. When he was assured that I was okay, he pulled my weapon from the ankle holster and pushed it in my hand. It felt cold and foreign.

"Listen, we need to get away from here," he told me. I said that my plane was just outside the town.

By nightfall, we were in Ankara. My shoulder, which had been hit by a part of the car suspension that became loose during the explosion, was bandaged, and I'd stopped shaking. Jack's face was tighter and harder than usual, but the familiar edge of anger was, if not missing altogether, at least dulled.

We got drunk on cheap alcohol that night. It left a stale, bitter burn all the way down my throat and a pleasant fuzziness in my mind. Before that day, I wouldn't have dreamed of getting pissed in front of an Interpol agent; but then, I had never shared an almost-death experience with one before, and Jack Valentine wasn't just any agent to begin with. I might never admit it, but I'd come to think of him as 'my' agent. I didn't necessarily like him. I certainly wasn't in love with him. I sure as hell didn't trust the bastard. And yet, there we were, the two of us; and in a way, he might have been the best friend I ever had. And if you couldn't get shit-faced in front of your friends, then who the hell _could_ you get shit-faced with?

"Do you ever get used to this?" my best almost-friend, quasi-enemy and sometimes-lover wanted to know after the first five or six rounds of drinks.

"It's not like people try to blow me up regularly. I don't even get shot at much. In fact," I stabbed my finger in his general direction at that point, "I can count the number of times someone held a gun to my head on one hand. And one of those is on your account."

Jack chuckled dryly. "I remember that. You claimed it didn't turn you on."

"Yeah." I paused and refilled both our glasses. Then, deadpan: "That was a lie."

He laughed at that and I joined in and then, suddenly – heaven knows what possessed me to say this – I told him: "I killed a man."

The admission didn't seem to impress him. His only reaction was to reach for the bottle and refill both our glasses. "What's one more or less?"

"No." For some reason, his none-too-favorable appraisal of my character and the weight of a dead man on my conscience seemed funny to me, so I laughed. I couldn't stop laughing until I was out of breath, my hand shaking, spilling the drink in my hand all over the desk. "No, man. I really killed him. Shot him, myself."

At that, at last, his interest seemed piqued. He drowned another shot and gave me a look that said, 'Tell me more'. So I did.

Even as drunk as I already was and with my level of intoxication rising by the minute, I knew that I should keep my big fucking mouth shut. My instincts had never let me down before – I always knew what to say and how, talking my way out of every kind of shit. And here I was, completely hammered, words spilling from my lips that I knew would eventually fuck me up.

"Guy named Simeon Weisz, you know him? Knew, I mean, because he's dead. Fuck, 'course you knew him. After all he was best buddies with the CIA and all that shit. Anyway, so I come to my hotel room and André fucking Baptiste is waiting for me, holding Weisz at gunpoint, telling me that I've got to take my revenge for what Weisz did to my uncle. He hands me the gun, and I don't want to do this and I tell him, so he says, okay, buddy, we do it together. Called it a bonding experience, the fucker! Ain't that a riot? Bonding experience."

By that time, I was shaking with laughter and hysterics, remembering the mad look in André's eyes, and the fear in Weisz's. The feel of the gun in my hand, heavier than it should have been and so different from any other time I've ever held a weapon.

I reached for a refill, and I almost couldn't hold the bottle because my hand was shaking so badly.

"So?" Jack asked, understandably keen to hear the rest of the story.

It was a fucking out-of-body experience: I saw myself sitting there, listened to myself telling Jack this stuff, and I thought, 'Shut up, man, before it's too late.'

Somewhere in the short-circuiting synapses of my brain, that warning must have gotten lost.

"So we're both holding the gun, and he says I only gotta tell him to stop. And I do. But Weisz's fucking brain was already splattered all over the fucking place by then." I paused to drink, feeling sick but unable to tell whether it was the alcohol or the memories. "So there's a gun out there which has been used in Weisz's murderer, and it has my fingerprints all over it. I'm pretty sure Andy didn't give it away. You don't waste blackmail material like his. This fucking thing gets into the wrong hands, and – bang – I go down!"

I don't remember much from that night, but I do remember noticing that right then, Jack's expression seemed almost carefully neutral.

"You ever ask Baptiste about the gun?" he wanted to know.

"We don't talk much these days," I said, vaguely. I remembered Vitaly, his body shaking with the impact of the bullets and then lying in the dirt, staring at me with those big, accusing eyes before they clouded over and he was gone, and I remembered André Jr.'s burnt body, and I blindly reached for the bottle.

The next morning, I awoke with a pounding headache and the stale, ugly taste of puke in my mouth. I remembered last night's conversation, even if I didn't remember much else. Somehow, the two of us must have made it back to his hotel room and to bed, and considering our level of intoxication, the facts that the sheets were stuck to my lower body and that my ass was on fire were almost a physical miracle. I carefully removed the sheets and made my way to the bathroom, meeting a pair of bloodshot eyes in the mirror.

When I returned to the bedroom fifteen minutes later, cleaned, shaved and vaguely resembling a human being again, Jack was awake, if barely.

"How did we get back here?" he asked, in lieu of a 'good morning'.

I shrugged. "No idea. I can't remember anything after the first vodka. Or was that tequila? Well, whatever came after the whiskey." It was a lie, because I did remember what I told him, and I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid. Instinctively, I knew that it was going to nip me in the butt eventually. I'd used up too many 'get out of jail free' tickets already. No one was _that_ lucky.

But if he remembered about the gun and the murder I confessed, he didn't mention it. "Yeah, well. I think my memories get rather fuzzy even before that," he said; and I didn't know if it was the truth or if he was lying through his teeth like I had been. Either way, that was the last time either of us mentioned that night.

Then again, it wasn't long before it all went to hell, anyway.

The problem with sleeping with the enemy was not that you forgot he was the enemy, but rather that you were lulled into a treacherous feeling of safety by the assumption that you knew him well enough to predict his next move. Ultimately, the destructive factor wasn't necessarily trust – it was routine.

Of course, I had known that. Everyone knows that. But knowing something and acting accordingly are two different kinds of beasts.

The deal that led me to Iraq was a precarious one, more so than usually, as General Southern's insistence to accompany me to the initial approach suggested. I had made sure that there would be no interruption. As far as Jack knew, the meeting between me and my client wouldn't happen for another twenty-hours, the rendezvous two hundred miles from where it actually was. Jack would have received this information from one of his usual sources, a man he trusted – as much as anyone trusts anyone else in this business – because he'd provided him with valid intel in the past. The bread crumbs I'd laid out for Jack were fool-proof enough to guarantee me a smooth ride. In fact, as there actually _was_ another, if minor, deal tomorrow, which Jack was probably going to mess up, he would never even know that I had lead him on.

It was a good plan. It was a solid plan.

To this date, I still don't know what went wrong. Maybe Jack knew that his source was on my pay roll. Maybe one of my people was on his pay roll. Maybe someone in the military had been talking to the wrong people. Shit, maybe I had been talking in my sleep.

The why and how didn't really matter, because suddenly, right after Southern and me had sat down with my client to discuss the bare bones of the deal, the ground was swarming with SWAT guys who poked at us with M16's and yelled for us to lie down on the ground. On of my client's bodyguards failed to comply. It wasn't pretty. So, there we were, two dozen Iraqis, a handful US soldiers, Southern and me, lying in the dirt while Jack fucking Valentine strode past us as if he owned the world.

I hated him a bit, back then.

I hated him even more after he snapped Southern in handcuffs and read him his rights and then failed to do the same to me. Instead, he gave me a mock salute and – as if that weren't enough – a cheerful, "Thanks, mate," which earned me a glare from my client that said 'You're dead' and a no less threatening look from Southern.

Within ten minutes, Jack had managed to destroy two decades of trust I'd built up with the caution of a game of jackstraws. Of course, that alone had been the point of the exercise. Jack knew as well as I did that men like Southern would never see the inside of a court room. He would most likely never even see the inside of an interrogation room. If he continued to believe, however, that I'd sold him out or even that the botched up deal was somehow my fault, I was so deep in shit that I might as well buy myself diving equipment.

After trying (more or less successfully – after all, I was still alive) to reason with my client that I definitely had no hand in the harsh interruption of our deal, I was in a hurry to get out of the country. I wasn't sure whether to admire Jack's courage or to abhor his insolence when he walked up to me in a crowded bar, just as I was about to call in a favor with an old friend, and offered to give me a ride home.

In a less public place, I might have punched him.

Or maybe not. There's no way of knowing how you'd react in the spur of the moment. When we finally _were_ in a less public place, my thirst for physical violence had dulled enough that instead of throwing a punch, I pushed him with his back against the door and tore off his shirt.

It was the only time we ever had angry sex, all bruises and frustration and resentment. Who we were and what we did had always played into the reasons why we were doing this, but that night, it was all it was about: a brutal display of our mutual antipathy, just another level of fighting our private little war. But then, I was on lost ground. It was easy for him to graciously let me have the upper hand and allow me to fuck him into the wall when he had already won.

And of course, he knew that. It was in every smirk, hiding behind every mocking gesture of submission. I emptied my lust inside of him, but the anger remained, strong as ever. He laughed in my face when I accused him of sabotaging me, as if I had told a particularly saucy joke.

"You know what's going to happen? They're going to blast my ass from here to Africa. I can't be trusted anymore, so I've fucking lost my use. You want me dead? Is it that?"

He was oddly calm in the face of my rage. "I don't want you dead. I just want you to fucking stop running guns!" There was a world of meaning between the words, which I chose to ignore and refused to interpret.

"And then what? I'm gone, someone else takes my place. You can't stop them all."

"No, maybe not. But as you like to say – you're fucking good at what you do. I'll just hope that whoever takes your place won't be as good." It was a fucking backhanded compliment, even though I didn't recognize it as such, back then. I think maybe Jack didn't either.

"You want me to stop? You should have let your man take my head off in Sierra Leone."

I heard him call, "Maybe I should have" after me when I left, slamming the door behind myself.

And that was how we left things between us. I used to be mad at Ava for the quiet, wordless way she left me, blaming her for never giving me a chance to talk it over or explain myself, but after the confrontation with Jack, I realized that maybe I should consider the silent nature of Ava's goodbye a small mercy.

For the next seven months, I didn't get to see Jack at all. I didn't miss him, exactly, but at the same time I couldn't stop mentally replaying that last fight.

If any good came out of it, it was that Jack stopped bothering me. He let me do my job – a job that, thanks to him, had become a hell of a lot more difficult, because while I could avoid the worst and talk myself out of all immediate suspicion, people were suddenly wary about trusting me. After all, even if it hadn't been part of my plan, if I hadn't been able to stop an Interpol agent from trailing me once, who could give any sort of guarantee that it wouldn't happen again?

Ironically enough, it was in West Africa that we met again. In the light of the recent development, I'd renewed my contact with Baptiste. There was a certain wariness between us, too, which hadn't been there before, but it had nothing to do with Jack's little stunt in Iraq. The loss of his son had changed Andy as, I imagine, the loss of Vitaly had changed me. Doing business with him went as smoothly as it always had, though.

When I returned to my hotel room, the curtains were drawn.

I found Jack sitting at the table, staring at me intently across the room. There was some shift in his eyes, some kind of restlessness darkening the gray. Otherwise, he didn't acknowledge my presence.

"Jack, old buddy. What gives me the pleasure of your company tonight?" I joked as I slipped off my shoes and shrugged off the jacket. I felt tired and filthy, but even though a scorching shower and a good night's sleep sounded heavenly right then, I doubted I'd get either of them for a while, judging from the expression on Jack's face. Something was wrong, and I was torn between the desire to know and the desire not to.

I stopped stripping and sat down across from him, the table a strong, physical barrier between us. Jack still hadn't moved, or spoken; and it was just starting to creep me out a bit.

"So?"

From up close, I could see that his lower lip was colored in an angry shade of red. There was a trace of almost dried blood in the middle. I got the impression he'd been chewing on it for a while. Who knows how long he'd been sitting here, in the dark.

Finally, he spoke. "Do you think it's wrong, morally, to take the confession of a drunken man and use it against them?"

My first instinct was to ridicule the fact that he was asking _me_ of all people about a matter of morals. I was hardly an authority on that. Then the impact of his words hit home, and I felt myself freezing from the inside, cold dread heavy like a stone on my chest.

If my life had been a movie, the camera would have zoomed in now. There might have been a long close-up sequence, and some angsty emo-ballad playing in the background. Maybe they'd even give me a flashback or one of those insightful voice-overs I disliked so much, because I couldn't conceive how anyone would come up with meaningful ramblings in situations when all I could think was, 'Holy fuck.'

I swallowed, realizing that this was the point I knew would come, and I'd be damned if I took this blow with anything but the serenity I'd reserved for it. "That depends… I guess. If you just filled the guy up to get him to reveal his secrets, yes. If you got shit-faced together and he was dumb enough to tell you stuff he shouldn't have told you… then I'd say it's his own fucking fault."

"Nothing wrong with it, then?" He looked up to me with haunted eyes, the guilt in them almost palpable.

I shrugged, giving Jack the answer I thought he wanted to hear: "Not from where I stand."

Jack nodded, quietly, unnerving me with his silence.

"Fuck, Jack, what's your problem? You want absolution? You got it! Shit, I'll even congratulate you. You should be fucking _cheering_. You got what you wanted – the ultimate proof to bring me down, and this time I'll hang for it. Literally, probably." There was no mirth in my laughter, even though I thought that the irony of the situation was rather funny. Jack, on the other hand, didn't seem to appreciate it. The man looked like a fucking statue, sitting rigidly in his chair with a dead serious expression, instead of celebrating his victory like he should. "So, why are you looking like someone just killed your firstborn?"

He looked away, averting his eyes like a man who couldn't face up what he was about to do – or maybe what he'd already done - and suddenly, I understood. "You think I'm going to tell on you… is it that? Are you afraid that I'll spill the beans that Interpol Agent Jack Valentine let an illegal arms dealer and murderer fuck him through the mattress on a regular base? Don't worry. I won't tell a soul! This has always been private. For me, anyway. Nothing to do with anything."

Jack laughed sharply. "You're guarding my secrets, huh? That's funny."

"And why is that?" I asked, suddenly tired. I didn't understand what was so funny when I've just handed him the perfect parting gift – absolution and lack of consequence – on a silver plate.

"Because I'm guarding yours." For the first time since I'd entered the room, he looked me in the eye, while his hands produced a small plastic bag he slid over the table to me. There was a gun inside. "You'd better get rid off it."

When I ran my hand across my face, it was shaking. I might have muttered a string of Ukrainian curses under my breath. I might have seen my life flashing in front of my eyes. I might even have fought down tears. Or maybe not.

I cannot remember either way. Those long moments after he handed me the gun are blanks in my mind. I do remember looking up to him and holding his gaze, though; and in that second, I realized that, for once, Jack wasn't making any demands. He could have held this over my head and used it to make me do anything – turn myself in, stop running guns, go legal – and he didn't. He had my freedom… shit, he had my fucking _life_ in his hands and he handed it back to me freely, nothing asked in return.

I continue to stare at him, trying to decipher what exactly this means. He calmly holds my gaze.

I think that maybe it's time I gave him what he wants.

End.


End file.
